Saturday, March 06, 2010

I mean, seriously, why would you want your kid to be raised in a school where they would teach him that his loving parents are terrible sinners who deserve to burn in hell if they don't repent from their love for each other?

No. The hazards of being raised Catholic are numerous and awful. It makes me happy to hear that one more child has been saved the misery.

Friday, March 05, 2010

“He shut it down to avoid legitimate questions about the Afghan detainee scandal,” Mr. Ignatieff charged as he asked that the Prime Minister release non-redacted documents the opposition says are essential to the story.

No. The Prime Minister said thousands of documents have already been released and show the Canadian Forces have conducted themselves honourably.

There he goes again. Second verse, same as the first. Stephen Harper wants to shuffle the blame off his own shoulders on to those of the soldiers who were the unwitting recipients of illegal orders.

Every time we go through this, he and his ministers keep acting as if the question is a matter of the behaviour of the soldiers. It's not. It's about the behaviour of the goverment - Harper's government - in giving orders to the soldiers.

It was the government that told the soldiers that the Afghan authorities were moral.

It was the government that told the soldiers to hand over prisoners to the Afghan authorities.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Assuming the events went down as chronicled (the usual disclaimer), there's no other name for it.

In summary: a woman excuses herself from a party and goes to sleep in the bed of her sometimes-lover. The lover's identical twin sneaks in to the room and has sex with her. Something seems wrong. Some subtle cue throws her off. She turns on the light and realizes what happened.

And someone has to ask, "Did the mistaken identity negate her consent?"

Of course it did. Imagine this instead. A man and a woman are having consensual sex like they have on the Discovery Channel. While the woman is facing away, the man pulls out and a second man - hidden until this moment - slips in and penetrates her.

Is that rape? Damn right it is.

The analogy is coherent and obvious. She generally consented to sex with her lover. Drunk people can have sex without it being considered rape when they have such an arrangement. Drunk people with no such prior arrangement don't have that luxury. She consented to sex with her lover and was fine with him slipping in to the room. She did not consent to sex with his brother.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

The Canadian people, via a majority vote of their Parliament, demanded that the government release all data on the torture of Afghan detainees.

The government, in clear violation of our democracy, ignored this demand. It ignored the will of the people.

That's not a democracy. That's a dictatorship.

On the rare occasions where the Canadian people actually get a government to vote the way they want it to vote, how is it that the guy at the top can simply refuse to comply? How is it that he can then go and shut down the government to avoid more questions?

That's a dictatorship.

But Liberal MP Derek Lee wants to draw a line. He's raising what's called a "point of privilege"; a declaration that a government minister has violated the will of the people and is in contempt of Parliament.

They in fact are in contempt.

But he says that he doesn't want this point of privilege to get in the way of the budget, even though it should if parliamentary procedure is followed.

Mr. Lee., let's break this down. The Harper government doesn't want to deal with parliament. It wants to ignore it. It wants to be free to send people to other countries to have them tortured. It wants to send Afghans off to be tortured. It wants to strand torture victims and child soldiers in other countries. It wants to do a lot of illegal and immoral things.

Mostly it wants to ignore Parliament to get its agenda pushed through. If all those confidence attachments to trivial legislation didn't clue you in, I don't know what will.

The point here is that there is no point continuing with this Parliament if the Harper government continues to treat it with such contempt. There's no use presenting a budget, a throne speech or any other piece of legislation if Harper and his cronies are simply going to ignore the actual legislation and do whatever they please anyway.

About Me

I found my way to atheism after too many years of Christianity and a brief interlude of confused Deism. I found my way to the left-wing when I realized that the measure of a society is not the wealth of its richest, but the poverty of its poorest.
Simply put: we will all do better when we rid ourselves of ignorance and look out for each other.